Tag Archives: pentatonic tricks

The sound of the Pentatonic scale is often associated with certain genres like rock, blues, country and western, but it certainly has it’s place within modern jazz and fusion as well. Most of us come from another genre to jazz and have certain ways of using the Pentatonic scale that is a bit harder to get to work in jazz. This lesson will show you some ways to come up with some more fresh sounding Pentatonic ideas.

All the examples are using E minor pentatonic, because I was in that kind of a mood that day.

Reshaping the Pentatonic shapes

The first example is demonstrating how you can use an alternative fingering for a standard CAGED or two note per string scale fingering.

The new way of playing the scale is using an alternating pattern of 3 and 1 notes per string. The Advantage is that this makes it easier to play for your right hand and also makes it easy to play some of the 4ths intervals within the scale.

You can see in the begining of the phrase in example 1 how I use this.

The fingering is shown here below in example 2:

3 notes per string and a II V I in D major

The 2nd lick is a II V I in D major and the Em pentatonic part (on the II chord) is making use of a 3 notes per string way of playing the scale.

The advantages to playing 3 notes per string with the pentatonic scale are that you get to explore a huge chunk of the neck and that it automatically helps you connect the different two notes per string positions while ascending the neck.

The lick is shown here below in example 3:

The line is using only the top part of the 3nps pattern since the entire pattern is a bit long.

The 3 note per string verison of the E minor pentatonic is shown here below:

Extending the 2 note per string pattern upwards and downwards

This example is making use of the 3 note per string pattern to make it easier to play faster and more intervallic runs is . Instead of thinking of the scale as a row of notes I am thinking of the two notes per string position with an upwards and downwards extension of one note for each string.

This gives me two 3 notes per string patterns, but they both have doubled notes since the last note on a string is the first note of the next string.

This can be practical for some types of lines, but the doubled notes can also make it hard to make sense of the melodies you make with these patterns.

The lick is shown here below in example 5:

The “extended” versions of the scales are shown here below:

Making use of these ideas

The ideas I show here are mostly just short glimpses of what is possible with these principles and of course you should sit down and explore them further to see what you can use them for. Probably the first step is that the lick I played or the scale will in some way inspire you to come up with something?

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Most guitarists learn the Pentatonic Scale as one of the first things they ever learn on the guitar, and most of the time it is not a scale that we think too much about when we use it. It’s just the pentatonic scale and it’s something that is in our ears and fingers for years. And that is even if we are already for the rest playing music with extended chords, altered dominants etc.

In this lesson I am going to take apart the pentatonic scale and look at some of the things that you can find in there since that might yield some new ways of using it by combining what you know of the pentatonic scale and what you know about improvising with chords and arpeggios.

The Pentatonic Scale

The pentatonic scale that I will spend time on in this lesson is this D minor pentatonic scale:

If you try to remember all the exercises you have done in a pentatonic scale you will probably find that they are all sequences and groups of notes (3 and 4 are very common) more than they are praciticing specific structures that could be seen as a chord.

Diatonic chords in the Pentatonic scale

In a major scale we create chords by stacking diatonic 3rds. A diatonic third is basically a just a note followed by the note 2 steps higher in the scale. If we build chords in the scale like this we get this scale exercise:

To get a better overview of what these arpeggios are you can play them as chords (the pentatonic scale is very forgiving with it’s 2 note per string fingerings) and that will give us the following set of chords that are “diatonic triads” in the pentatonic scale.

As you can see the “triads” that we build are almost never consisiting of actuall 3rd intervals and especially the 4th is much more present in the chords which is why we get stacks of 4ths (the sus chord inversions).

The chords we have are then Dm, F, Gsus4, Csus4, Dsus4 which you could consider the diatonic triads in the scale.

Even if it is possible to play this in a position like I did in example 3 it is very useful both for comping and for using them as arpeggios to practice these on a string set like shown in example 4:

It is worth while to keep in mind that if you can use the pentatonic scale to play a solo over a chord then probably the chords in example 4 are good for comping over that chord. Maybe try out example 4 over a Bb bass note to get a Bbmaj7 sound.

Open voiced diatonic chords

Now that we have 3 different types of chords: major, minor and sus4. We can start getting more out of the chords by playing them as open voiced triads. The easiest place to start with making open voiced triads is to take example 4 and then lower the 2nd note an octave. If you do that you will get the following chords:

With open voiced triads you get a lot out of inverting them, because they contain a lot of quite large intervals. To just cover that I’ve written out a set of inversions for each type of the open voiced triads:

Practicing these open voiced triad inversions is a great thing to put to use with pentatonic scales and they are also great for right hand accuracy and technique since they contian a lot of irregular string skips.

If you want to check out open voiced triads in more detail you can also have a look at this lesson: Open Triads in Solos

Shell voicings in the pentatonic scale

One way to think of the D minor pentatonic scale is to think of it as a Dm7 arpeggio with an added G. Since the Dm7 chord is to be found in the scale we can of course also use a Dm7 shell voicing and try to play that through the scale.

I have written this out in example 9. The most logical starting point seemed to be the standard Dm7 shell voicing in the 5th fret. From There I take it through all 5 degrees of the scale to get some other voicings. Some of the voicings have nice seconds in them and can be put to good use in any situation where Dm pentatonic is an option.

If you want to know more about using shell voicings as arpeggios you can also check out my lesson on this subject: Shell Voicings as Arpeggios

A few examples

All three examples are basic II V I progressions in the key of C, so Dm7, G7alt and Cmaj7. They should illustrate how you can use some of the arpeggios and structures cover in the first part of this article.

The first example is using the open voiced triads, and more or less just playing the first two arpeggios from example 5, which are a Dm and then an inversion of a Csus4 (or an open voiced Fsus2 if you will). From there the line descends down the scale and continues to a G7 alt line that is based around an AbmMaj7(9) arpeggio that then is resolved via the Ab to the 5th(G) of C.

Using the “diatonic triads” from example 2 in a similar basic way is also a very useful. In the 2nd line I start of with an A and then go into the F major 2nd inversion and G sus 4 triads from example 2. On the G7alt the line is using the Bb min pentatonic scale. First a stack of 4ths from Bb, which would be the same as the Dsus4 triad in example 2. Fromt here it descends down the scale and resolves to the 7th of Cmaj7

The third example is mixing up the open voiced triads and stacks of 4ths. First an open voiced Csus4 triad followed by a Gsus4 triad. From there it continues with a basic line on G7alt that is build around an AbmMaj7 arpeggio that via an chromatic approach resolves to the 5th(G) of Cmaj7

Some of the chord names that I end up using in this lesson like the Gsus4 and the Dsus4 are maybe not the best names to describe the sound that you have at your disposal with these arpeggios, but it is still very worth while to use this approach to get some new arpeggios and melodic structures out of the pentatonic scale. By looking at it in the same way we would the major or melodic minor scale.

I hope that you can use the material that I went over here to get some new ideas and make some good surprising lines using pentatonic scales.

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